Spring is finally in the air, March Madness is crazier than ever, and Volacci is on a segway tour of downtown Austin today! Have you seen the Chimpanzee Riding a Segway video by Parry Gripp? If you haven’t had your morning coffee yet, there may be no need. There is nothing like a chimpanzee in overalls and a red helmet riding a segway to get you excited that its Friday! But I digress. There was some really cool news this week: Drupal 7.0 Alpha 3 came out, Bing rolled out some new search features, and all that other stuff in the title of this post. Join me after the jump for a Drupal rap video, more conference news, and an international search controversy!

DRUPAL NEWS“Hands On Drupal” Rap This is a Drupal rap video produced by Albert Hughes of Schipul - a web marketing firm in Houston. The video took the Drupal community by storm this week. Check it out:

Drupal 7 Alpha 3 Released On Monday, Drupal 7.0 Alpha 3 was released for further testing and feedback. Here are the release notes for changes made to Drupal 7.0 Alpha 2: The most notable is that Drupal 7.0 will now ship with jQuery 1.4.2 and jQuery UI 1.8. You can help escalate the release date for 7.0 by helping test out this alpha and provide feedback. Please remember: this alpha version should not be used for production sites.jQuery Conference 2010: San Francisco Bay Area Announced Since the Drupal 5 release, jQuery has been included in the Drupal core. The jQuery Conference 2010: San Francisco Bay Area was announced yesterday on http://sf2010.drupal.org by Greg Knaddison. The jQuery Conference 2010: San Francisco Bay Area will be held at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Research Center in Mountain View, California on April 24th and April 25th. Yes, this is the weekend following DrupalCon San Francisco 2010. So, as Greg points out, you may want to extend your hotel stay. Tickets are priced at $199, while a limited amount of student tickets will be available for $99, with valid school ID. The conference, much like DrupalCon, will also start with a day of training that costs $299 and will be held at a separate venue. This conference sounds like it will provide outstanding opportunities to honing your jQuery skills and further fanning your javascript passion. Follow the jQuery blog for more details. And you can register now for this event. SEARCH NEWSYahoo’s New Mobile Apps: Sketch-a-Search™ and Yahoo! Search At the International CTIA Wireless 2010 this Wednesday, Yahoo! announced two new mobile Yahoo! search apps for the iPhone and iPhone Touch. With the first app, called Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search, you can draw a shape on a map to discover local restaurants around your current location, or anywhere else in the states. Even if you don’t know the zip code you’re in, you can find a great local restaurant. The second app, simply named Yahoo! Search, integrates voice search, embedded maps, and intelligent search history from Yahoo Finance, Movies, and News. You can also customize local maps, refine with location-based, local results, and browse associated ratings and reviews of what you searching. Yahoo! Search mobile app is available in 22 countries across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Both apps are now available for free at the iTunes store. Google vs. China Earlier this week, Google stopped censoring search results in China. Instead, Google is redirecting mainland China search traffic from www.google.cn to a new, uncensored version of its site in Hong Kong: www.google.hk. To be perfectly clear, Google didn’t argue that censorship was intolerable, but that they have been getting hit by a wave of hacking attacks against companies, including themselves, as well as Gmail accounts of human rights activists. The Chinese government also shut off Chinese citizens’ access to YouTube, Blogger, Twitter and Facebook. The next move could be that China blocks access for its citizens to the Hong Kong site. Google’s next move would be to call Washington in for assistance. It’s unclear whether Washington would want to get involved. Currently, China said Google’s decision to move to Hong Kong does not affect ties with Washington. If another block occurs with the Hong Kong site, Google could also just wipe its hands clean of China and move on. Though it is a tough decision, seeing as the Chinese internet search market is growing by 40% a year. It could be that the Chinese government could shut off all access to everything Google. If that were so, we could see a perennial search powerhouse emerge from China in the next few years. Bing Introduces New Search Features for Spring Revamp Yesterday, Microsoft rolled out new features for the Bing search engine that include Quick Tabs, an Answer Box, and new mapping tools powered by Foursquare, which deliver real-time data embedded in maps. This move helps distinguish Bing from Google’s search style even more, and reiterates themselves truly as a “decision engine”. Quick Tabs Quick Tabs provides fast access to subcategories of search, such as news, events, and weather. The new format places these tabs on the top of your basic search results, rather than on the left sidebar, where they currently are. More Real-Time Search The ink is finally dry on the deals Bing made with Facebook and Twitter last October, and we will start seeing real-time search results. One thing Bing is going to do is show more popular shared links from news websites. Foursquare Map App If you are familiar with Foursquare, the social game based on visiting real-world places, then you may get as excited as we are. Soon, in Bing Maps, you can turn on the Foursquare Map App and see what’s popular in an area, much like, as Bing puts it, an “interactive day planner”. These new features aren’t new under-the-hood search technology, but rather a tweak on how search results will be delivered in the near future. Bing says these new features will be rolled out within the next month while a small percentage of users will see the updates within a week. Thanks For Reading! Did you find this post entertaining, useful, or interesting? Please repost, retweet, or redistribute to any of the social sites of your choice, and please subscribe to our RSS feed for daily fodder. For every RSS subscription Volacci gets, a kitten earns its whiskers. You like kittens, don’t you? Do the right thing, then. Subscribe. 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